article · Sustainability
Agricultural systems face significant pressure from climate change alongside growing demands for nutritious and sustainable food. While major commercial legumes currently dominate markets, their cultivation contributes to resource depletion and environmental degradation. In contrast, neglected grain legumes offer vital ecosystem services, enhance biodiversity, and demonstrate resilience to climatic disruptions, providing strong nutritional and health benefits. However, socio-economic challenges, limited market demand, and underdeveloped value chains restrict their adoption by farmers, particularly in developing regions. Consequently, food systems remain reliant on a narrow set of vulnerable crops. Addressing these barriers requires focused policy reforms, genetic improvements, and international cooperation to exchange technologies and farming practices. Enhancing the role of neglected legumes is critical for strengthening food and nutrition security and building sustainable agricultural systems across sub-Saharan Africa.
Relying heavily on a few primary crops leaves agricultural systems vulnerable to climate shocks and worsens environmental degradation. Promoting neglected grain legumes can diversify diets, reduce malnutrition, and improve ecological health. Understanding the barriers to their adoption helps policymakers, researchers, and development agencies target investments that build more resilient and nutritious food systems in vulnerable regions.
The work highlights opportunities for agricultural enterprises, plant breeders, and food processors to develop underutilised legume varieties and their associated supply chains. Potential applications include developing improved crop genetics, new food products, and climate-resilient farming inputs. However, because the abstract describes a review identifying research gaps, policy needs, and underdeveloped value chains, these opportunities remain at an early, conceptual stage rather than near commercial readiness.
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Increasing demand for nutritious, safe, and healthy food, including the need to preserve biodiversity and other resources, signifies a prodigious challenge for agriculture, which is already at risk from climate change. Diverse and healthy plant-based diets may significantly reduce food insecurity, malnutrition, diet-related diseases, and other health-related issues. More attention to agricultural systems diversity is mandatory to improve the economic, environmental, ecological, and social sustainability of food production in developing countries. In this context, neglected legume production could significantly provide nutritional and healthy benefits for people while adhering to sustainability principles. However, the contribution of neglected legumes to food and nutrition security is still limited due to socio-economic challenges faced by farmers that contribute to the underutilization of neglected legumes, leading to overreliance on a few legumes with poor resilience to climatic perturbations, thus posing a risk to sustainable food production. While major legumes offer higher economic returns and more developed value chains, they also contribute to environmental degradation and resource depletion. Neglected legumes, on the other hand, provide ecosystem services, promote biodiversity, and offer climate resilience but face economic challenges due to limited market demand and underdeveloped value chains. Consequently, food nutritional insecurity and human health concerns remain prevalent, especially in developing countries. There is an urgent need to promote neglected legumes in agricultural systems through policy change implementation, genetic improvement, and development, fostering international cooperation to share knowledge, technologies, and best practices in the production and utilization of neglected legumes. This review comprehensively explores the utility of neglected legumes for food, nutritional security, and human health. It identifies knowledge gaps that should be prioritized as part of research strategies for sustainable future food systems in sub-Saharan Africa.
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DOI: 10.3390/su17010350
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